“After all, [the world] is on my side. That is, I’m a part of it. Not separate from it. I walk on the ground and the ground’s walked on by me, I breathe the air and change it, I am entirely interconnected with the world.”
“If it is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it’s useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag, or a basket, or a bit of rolled bark or leaf, or a net woven of your own hair, or what have you, and then take it home with you, home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people, and then later on you take it out and eat it or share it or store it up for winter in a solider container or put it in the medicine bundle or the shrine or the museum, the holy place, the area that contains what is sacred, and then next day you probably do much the same again — if to do that is human, if that’s what it takes, then I am a human being after all. Fully, freely, gladly, for the first time.”
The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin
“Things don’t have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What’s the function of a galaxy? I don’t know if our life has a purpose and I don’t see that it matters. What does matter is that we’re a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass.”
—Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven (viasoracities)
Dedicated to Ursula K Le Guin, 21 October 1929 - 22 January 2018
I’m both extremely happy and extremely sad to be posting this episode. Happy because it’s such a huge milestone: the last Ribbon of chapter 3, and the final part of the first volume, which I’ll be collecting in print later this year.
Sad because Ursula K Le Guin, the author who I love the most, and whose work inspired me to create The Firelight Isle, passed away today.
I hope, if even for a fleeting moment, The Firelight Isle can move you as deeply as her work has moved me.
